Use This Marketing Strategy to Increase Web Sales by 300% This Month

Author: Charlie Cook | July 15th, 2008

“My web site stinks! I’ve been spending thousands of dollars a week on pay-per-click ads but they’re not paying for themselves. I’m only getting a few leads and sales from my site. What am doing wrong? How do I get my web site to sell?”
Martha C., NY

What’s Missing From Your Web Site?
Are you wondering why all the people who come to your web site don’t contact you or buy from you? You know you’ve got top quality products and services, but few visitors to your site are staying long enough to read the details, much less contact you or buy from you.

Shift Your Focus Away From Traffic
Most web site owners do what Martha did. They put up a web site and then they focus on getting all the traffic they can to their site. Typically the fastest way to do this is to spend money on pay-per-click advertising. That’s the first and biggest mistake!

I regularly talk to web site owners who’ve spent thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars a month on pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimization. They’re spending money hand over fist on driving traffic to their sites and still not breaking even.

Imagine you have a relatively new car. It still has that distinctive new car smell, but it has a major defect. Every time you turn the engine on, all you can do is rev the engine. You can’t get the car in gear. Obviously your shiny new car isn’t taking you anywhere.

Like your car, if your web site isn’t doing it’s most basic job, you won’t move forward. No matter how much money you spend to bring traffic to your site, if you aren’t converting traffic to leads and sales, your site won’t be profitable. There are thousands of web sites selling products and services that customers want. Very few of them successfully convert traffic to profits.

Why Most People Focus On Traffic and Why You Shouldn’t
Most web site owners focus their spending on getting more traffic to their sites for a simple reason; it’s easy. Just cut the check for your SEO expert, or send the payments to Google or one of the other pay-per-click advertising services, and the problem is taken care of, right? Wrong.

Traffic Comes After Conversion
Do the math. If your web site isn’t converting visitors to sales now, how is sending more traffic to your site going to help?

On the other hand, by making a few simple changes to your marketing strategy and web site, you can easily increase your site conversion rates by 300%. Make a few more design and copy changes, and you could do what one of my clients did; increase your conversion rates by 1,700%.

How to Convert Visitors To Buyers
You want the people who come to your web site to stay, read your pages and to either contact you by email or phone and to buy from you. What’s the fastest and most cost efficient way to make this happen?

1. Do you know anyone who owns an iPod? They’ve sold lot hotcakes and made Apple an unbelievable amount of money for two reasons: they look cool and they are amazingly easy to use. That’s what your web site should be too, appealing and easy to use.

Use the design of your site to make it clear what you want people to read first, second and third. Lead them to take the actions you want them to take.

2. Focus your marketing copy on your prospects’ problems and goals. Remember; your objective is to help people buy, not to hit them over the head with a sales pitch about your products or services.

3. Focus every page of your site on one or both of the following: generating leads (so you can follow up) and/or helping people get the product or service they want.

4. Remember that your site needs to establish you or your company as the trusted, expert source to go to for your particular product niche. Audio and video testimonials provide the social proof you need and with relevant, meaningful content are essential to establishing this.

I’m always amazed at how many web site owners expect to use their web site to increase sales by hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions. and then spend so little time or effort creating a site that actually sells. And when the site doesn’t perform, they keep throwing money at advertising to bring traffic to a site that doesn’t work.

P.S. Still on the fence about where to spend your online marketing dollars? Consider this. If you spent the same amount of time or money on increasing your conversion rates as you did on increasing traffic, you’d get four to twenty times the return.

P.P.S. Something is wrong with the math! Most web site owners spend more on advertising their site than they do on creating a site that sells. If you want your web site to make you your next hundred thousand or half million, isn’t it worth finding out how to do it?
Find out the secrets to creating a top-selling site >>

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